After eight days we’ve come to the end of our Blogging platforms series - written from an author’s perpective, with limited coding skills. Let’s take an overall look at each of the 6 platforms:

Blogger: -Pros: Flexibility, a good amount of theme control, ease of use. Cons: Bad reliability at times, as well as less than satisfactory speeds. Recommended for blooking, or posting a book in blog form.

Wordpress.com: - Pros: Complete feature set, good looking themes, active development, good support. Cons: Severe limitations - almost no customization (can customize CSS if you pay). Stay away, unless they allow you a greater say in your blog’s theme.

Wordpress.org: - Pros: Robust, stable, in active development, comes with complete support base, open source, free, the list goe on and on. Cons: Steep learning curve for non web professionals who want to customize their blogs, needs own server. The perfect solution for writing a blook because almost anything can be done with Wordpress.

Blogsome: - Pros: Flexible, Wordpress features, ease of use with theme customization, hassle-free plugins. Cons: Reliability, no ability to use own domain name. An okay choice, but the inability to use your own domain name (short of using a redirect, which is a waste of time) should detract you from it.

Terapad: - Pros: One stop location for everything you need in a blog, good cuztomization options. Cons: Interface can be improved - not very easy to use for the first timer, only four themes. Terapad is a wild card - still very new, but promising. Only time will tell as to how it all shapes up.

And, last, but not least:

Vox: - Pros: Ease of use trumps all other 5 selections, huge selection of themes, seamless integration with third party web apps. Cons: Social orientated, so not suitable for blog promotion, no commenting for non Vox users, no theme customization. Use this only if you don’t even know what a blog is. Great for beginners, or for creating fictional blogs of fictional characters. Otherwise, stay away.

And this is the conclusion of the series! Should you ever wish to blog your book, take a stroll through these reviews - I do hope something in there will be helpful to ensure choosing the right blogging platform sets you off to a head start in blooking.

This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started eight days ago. We’ve covered Blogger, and three blogging platforms that use Wordpress, so now we’re going to take a look at Terapad - a new player in blogging, but one with quite a lot of promise.

Terapad is a fairly new member to the blogging world. Apparently their creators took a look at what was available out there, saw that there were all these disparate functions on blogs, and then decided to bring it all together in one nice package, free of charge, but ad supported.

Ease Of Use

Terapad is above average in ease of use. You sense that they absolutely refuse to allow you to touch code, giving you little blanks for sidebar categories to paste your sidebar elements in, and allow seamless integration with third party services like Meebo and Google Analytics. It may take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with where the shiny ‘new post’ button is, but once you do it works slick and fast and easy.

The dashboard for Terapad is tabbed, and cleanly labelled, and each of these tabs when clicked shows you the options page, with a short explanation for what all the elements on page are about at the top. I’d have preferred it if there were little pop-ups telling me what the various options did, but all I got were non-informative little icons.

When it comes to handling text and the written word however, Terapad works brilliantly with no complaints on my part. It has a good editor, plenty of functions, and an easy to understand file system for organizing your pages and/or posts.

Looks

Terapad looks extremely polished. There are only 4 themes at the moment (unfortunately), and you can only touch the CSS for these themes, but everything from the ‘front-end’ to the ‘back-end’ looks beautiful. The Mac icons on each of the menu pages scream OSX, but at the very least it’s plagiarisism that oozes cool.

As for the blogs themselves I’ve yet to see anything jaw dropping, as most of the ‘top 10 sites’ all use one of the four themes (yawn). But a look at the style sheets behind each of these blogs told me that there’s quite a degree of custiomization available to the end user, and as time goes by I’m sure we’ll start seeing good, unique looking blogs powered by Terapad.

Features

Terapad comes bundled with its own stat service, as well as forums, a store, a careers page, an events page and an image gallery. When you actually think about it, all of these tabs can be used by authors, with the possible exception of the careers page. The blog section will be for the blook, the events section can be used for book tours and readings, forums are just another way of reaching out to the reader, and the store can be used for eBook selling and/or blatant self promotion.

This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started five days ago. We’re going to move up from Wordpress.com to the downloadable Wordpress platfrom, and seeing how it fares for writing online.

The downloadable Wordpress platform is the Firefox of bloggers - free, open source, reliable and powerful. The question is this: is it too daunting for the average author to use?

Ease of Use

Wordpress.org is very big on ease of use. Captions like ‘Our famed five minute install’ and its whimsical software upgrade pages poke fun at what they know to be a good user experience.

But while the application insists on its ease-of-use all through downloading, uploading, installing and then customizing, my personal experience two years ago with the platform, as ‘an average user of the internet (who understood basic HTML)’ deviated from the normal ‘5 minute install’, mainly because I used a dicky zip program, didn’t know what FTP was, and uploaded everything into the wrong directory. All in all it took me 2 hours to get everything up and running on my server. Not a good start for such a famed blogging platform, I thought then.

Hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere, don’t we?

But i’m getting slightly ahead of myself in this review. Allow me to explain roughly of what consists of a Wordpress installation.

First off, you download the package from Wordpress.org. It contains a collection of files, mostly PHP, that make up the platform. You open up one file and edit a few lines.

Next, you get your hands on an FTP client (Filezilla is recommended) and then upload the hundred-plus files to a MySQL server. It must be noted that good, free and reliable hosts with PHP are very hard to find (in a year’s worth of searching for a friend the best i could come up with was F2O), but Wordpress.org has a list of good hosts that you have to pay for.

Last of all you go through a breezy setup process that clearly shows why Wordpress is so loved - smooth and easy, tongue in cheek.

Wordpress sounds daunting, but for a platform as powerful as it is the setup and day-to-day running is well designed enough for almost anybody to use. Added features (through plugins) and themes are installed simply by uploading and activating (one click only). It’s top of the line where blogging is concerned, but if you ever intend to edit a theme or write a plugin with no knowledge of PHP, things get tough very fast.

Looks

I’ve already written about how good Wordpress looks in my Wordpress.com review, and everything is equally good, if not better with the downloaded version. Themes are created by a huge community of users, some good, others ugly not to my taste. The great thing about Wordpress is that almost anything is possible in theme designing - Ajax, easy integration with Flickr, Flash, and it’s all done on a platform that’s dedicated to producing standards complaint code. If you don’t understand what that means just buzz it out and understand that it’s good, all good.

This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started two days ago. Here i’ll be reviewing the suitability of the Blogger platform as a medium for blooking, or writing a book on a blog.

The Blogger platform has got it pretty good after being acquired by Google and coming out of a second beta. It’s a simple platform, free, instantly available, and very user friendly. The interface has only 3 tabs - posting, settings and template, keeping options easily accessible and providing a simple flow to any first-time blogger.

Ease of Use

Blooger is amongst the easiest blogging platforms to use. You start off with creating an account, choosing a theme and then you can immediately start posting with a simple interface.

One of its biggest attractions is the fact that Blogger is widely supported. You can post with it through email, phone and services like Flickr and Technorati work with Blogger (almost) seamlessly. Setting are very easily tweaked - a button here, an option there.

Looks

You can’t go wrong with Blogger’s default templates - they’re all clean, and beautifully done - both inside (code) and outside (looks). It turns out that the Blogger team hired Stopdesign to do their themes, and a look under the hood of these templates shows just how good these guys actually are.

The main problem with this, however, is the fact that after awhile it all becomes bland. Here is where the ease of use of the Blogger platform shines through. Templates are created in a one page xHTML document, although clever Blogger users have been known to create Flash and Ajaxified Blogger blogs. It’s flexible to a certain degree - but you can’t deny that your coding options are pretty limited. :(

On the up side, it’s incredibly easy to edit or create a template - for beginners, load up Minima and start tinkering. Extra templates can be found here and here, but bear in mind the design elements i talked about in my Writing An Addictive Blook series - particularly the point about fonts needing to be big enough for readers to be comfortable with.

Features

Here Blogger scores less marks. A result of all that ease-of-use is that the Blogger platform is static, or severely limited. With the new Blogger (right out of beta) some of the old platform’s issues have been addressed, but unfortunately there’s bound to be a limit, what with it being a free service and all. What am i talking about? Well, let’s take a look at Blogger’s feed options for example.

By default Blogger offers both Atom and RSS, but what are your options for customizing these feeds? Can you exclude certain categories of posts from ending up being published in your feed? Can you edit the way your feed is presented? No, i thought not. And while Blogger has ‘linkback’ it doesn’t have trackback - the standard used by Wordpress and Movable Type blogs.